Method & Madness Art Class | Midleton | Belfast Whiskey Week 2023

There are evenings at Belfast Whiskey Week that linger in the memory long after the last dram is done — and the Method & Madness Marbling Workshop, held on Friday 21st October 2023, was very much one of them. Tucked away in a gallery studio on the Belmont Road, this was an event that invited attendees to explore the experimental spirit of Midleton Distillery's boundary-pushing Method & Madness range while learning an art form as old as the hills: marbling, the ancient craft of painting on water. Craft in the glass, craft on the page — it was a pairing that made perfect, unexpected sense.

About This Event

Looking Back

The venue itself set the tone before a single drop had been poured. Stephen Whalley and Dawn Crothers' gallery and studio on Belmont Road is not your typical whiskey tasting space, and that was entirely the point. Canvases lined the walls, pigments and inks crowded the workbenches, and by the time guests settled in, there was already an atmosphere of creative permission in the room — the kind of duchas that comes when a space has been shaped by years of genuine artistic practice. For a whiskey festival session, it felt refreshingly alive.

Stephen Whalley led the marbling workshop with the easy authority of someone who has long since made peace with the unpredictability of his medium. Marbling — the centuries-old technique of floating colour on the surface of water and lifting the pattern onto paper — is, by its very nature, a study in controlled chaos. You guide the pigments, but the water has its own ideas. It was a fitting metaphor for the whiskies being poured alongside it. The Method & Madness range from Midleton's micro distillery is built on exactly that tension: rigorous craft pushing into genuinely experimental territory. Single grain aged in virgin Spanish oak, single pot still finished in chestnut casks — these are expressions designed to ask questions rather than simply reassure.

Four drams were poured across the session, each one arriving at roughly the right moment to give attendees something to contemplate between artistic attempts. The conversation in the room was warm and genuinely curious — comparing what showed up on the marbled paper with what was showing up on the palate, both shaped by forces that resisted full prediction. More than one person admitted it was the first time they'd thought of whiskey maturation and ink diffusion in the same breath, and yet it made a kind of instinctive sense. Midleton Very Rare and its sister ranges have always carried that duality — deep tradition underpinning restless innovation — and the Method & Madness expressions wear it most openly.

What made this event particularly well-judged was the way it created space for people who might not describe themselves as whiskey experts to feel entirely at ease. The activity gave hands something to do and eyes somewhere to look, which has a way of loosening the self-consciousness that can sometimes grip people at a formal tasting. By the time the conversation turned to cask influence and flavour profiling, it felt like a natural extension of what the room was already exploring, not a lecture being delivered. That is harder to achieve than it looks, and the collaboration between the distillery, Stephen Whalley, and the Belfast Whiskey Week team deserves credit for it.

If you're curious about where Irish whiskey is heading — and which distilleries are doing the most interesting work in that space — the BWW Whiskey Map is a good place to begin charting your own course. As for the Method & Madness range: it remains one of the more honest expressions of what a modern Irish distillery can do when it gives its distillers genuine latitude. Sláinte to everyone who left Belmont Road that Friday with ink on their fingers and something worth thinking about in their glass.

The Brand: Midleton Very Rare

Every year since 1984, the marker on the whiskey Ireland calendar. A hand-selected, limited annual vintage.

Explore the full programme on the Belfast Whiskey Week Whiskey Map.

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